Tomorrow's Business Today
The point of titllating tabloids
The other day newspapers got a missive from lawyers looking after the family of Sarah Harding, the Girls Aloud singer who just died.
Leave them alone, it said.
A few weeks back The Sun paid “substantial damages” to England cricketer Ben Stokes and his mother, for publishing details of a family tragedy on its front page.
In the case of Sarah Harding’s family, I think we can agree there is no public interest in them being hassled.
The Stokes case is less clear.
The only way I can be sure that The Guardian and the FT, say, are free to poke around in awkward places is because the tabloids can do the same on things I could care less about.
It is hard to see how the FT can expose Wirecard so brilliantly, if The Sun is just barred from looking into the life of Ben Stokes.
A worrying development here I think is lawyers employing judge’s rulings in celebrity cases to block corporate exposes.
A colleague argues that the best thing would be for tabloids to behave themselves precisely so that lawyers can’t argue that precedents were set when they screwed things up.
I don’t think I agree. Tabloids have been muted enough. They need to win a few fights.
Press release of the day
What would $100 in the various crypto currencies a year ago be worth?
Some quite startling you-have-missed-the-boat stats here from Traders of Crypto.
That small bet on Dogecoin would now be worth $8,635, the same in Binance would be over $2000.
